Now that we know this, throw the raft away.”
(-The Scripture of the Golden Eternity)
"Don't use the phone.
People are never ready to answer it.
Use poetry."
“the only people for me are the mad ones,
the ones who are mad to live,
mad to talk,
mad to be saved,
desirous of everything at the same time,
the ones who never yawn
or say a commonplace thing,
but burn, burn, burn
like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”
(from On the Road )
“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”
(from Dharma Bums)
"The only truth is music.”
“I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up
running from one falling star to another till i drop.
This is the night, what it does to you."
“Live, travel, adventure, bless, and don't be sorry.”
"Great things are not accomplished by those
who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion."
"What is that feeling when you're driving away from people
and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing?
- it's the too-huge world vaulting us,
and it's good-bye."
“On soft Spring nights I'll stand in the yard under the stars -
Something good will come out of all things yet -
And it will be golden and eternal just like that -
There's no need to say another word.”
(-Big Sur)
"The best teacher is experience
and not through someone's distorted point of view."
“Let the mind beware, that though the flesh be bugged,
the circumstances of existence are pretty glorious.”
"I believe in order, tenderness, and piety."
"Down on the lake rosy reflections of celestial vapor appeared,
and I said, 'God, I love you' and looked to the sky and really meant it.
'I have fallen in love with you, God.'"
“It always makes me proud to love the world somehow- hate's so easy compared.”
(-Big Sur)
“One man practicing kindness in the wilderness
is worth all the temples this world pulls.”
(-Dharma Bums)
"I woke up as the sun was reddening;
and that was the one distinct time in my life,
the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was
- I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel,
in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen,
hearing the hiss of steam outside,
and the creak of the old wood of the hotel,
and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds,
and I looked at the cracked high ceiling
and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds.
I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger,
and my whole life was a haunted life,
the life of a ghost."
“I have lots of things to teach you now, in case we ever meet,
concerning the message that was transmitted to me
under a pine tree in North Carolina on a cold winter moonlit night.
It said that Nothing Ever Happened, so don't worry. It's all like a dream.
Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don't know it because of our thinking-minds.
But in our true blissful essence of mind is known that everything is alright
forever and forever and forever.
Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds,
listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world,
and you will remember the lesson you forgot,
which was taught in immense milky way soft cloud innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all.
It is all one vast awakened thing. I call it the golden eternity. It is perfect.
We were never really born, we will never really die.
It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere:
Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. That which passes into everything is one thing.
It's a dream already ended. There's nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be glad about.
I know this from staring at mountains months on end.
They never show any expression, they are like empty space.
Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away?
Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space,
which is the one universal essence of mind, the vast awakenerhood, empty and awake,
will never crumble away because it was never born."
- a letter he wrote to his first wife, Edie in '57 (The Portable Jack Kerouac)
“I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all.
The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost,
like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream,
like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water,
most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood
and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago."
(-Dharma Bums)
---
Belief & Technique For Modern Prose
by Jack Kerouac
List of Essentials
1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven
---
http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/1742.Jack_Kerouac
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment